Private industry doing it better than the government.

Then my wife mentioned that perhaps he's concerned about his own comings and goings being tracked...

He's more concerned with trying to explain away his diverting of $10 million obligated to pay for health insurance for poor kids that inexplicably went to two PACs then the Republican Party of Florida, all without anyone knowing who diverted the funds, including the people who were charged with managing the funds.

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

Sounds like you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole

Don't you mean put a cylinder in the square hole?

Actually, Trump is not a singular cause. He was not the first. Back under reagan, he killed a great deal of our civilian oriented R&D saying that private business can do it , while moving some to DARPA. Thankfully, DARPA still funded basic science.
Then W did more cuts, but pushed a lot of DARPA spending in UNI over to companies and forced cuts in basic science.
Biden also did major changes and pushed funding to go from merit based to DEI.
Trump is just a continuation of this and not even the worst ( reagan or W were the worst ).

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

Well, that character isn't on my keyboard. I don't even bother to double up my hyphens - I just use one as an em-dash. If it was a key, I'd use it. Until then, I'll just use the one hyphen and let Word or whatever deal with it.

Alt-0151 will get you the em dash. Or, type 2014 then hit Alt-X and Word will convert it for you.

Now be a good American and whine how that is too difficult.

Tariffs are a tax collected by business for the government. Since Trump is the one who gave the illegal order, he would be responsible, but since the Supreme Court has ruled a president is untouchable, nothing will be done.

Next up will be a "national emergency" to prevent or disallow the results of the general election.

Remember when Elon bought the place and ran most of them out on a rail?

Considering Elon WORKED for the government to spread propaganda, continues to censor certain posts and words, blocked publication of information about J.D. Vance prior to the election, and continues to let lies about the 2020 election proliferate, no, I don't remember.

Then you have the people that think upscaling an image 3x makes it more detailed and sharper.

It doesn't? You might want to tell these folks.

So, die of skin cancer instead of Alzheimer's?

Nope, there's now a vaccine for that.

When Ukraine dissects the remains of Russian drones or missiles, they inevitably find western components. In one case, reported on here, they found an Nvidia chip inside a missile.

Is someone, or someones, inside the supply chain redirecting chips? Is this the same as the servers getting to China? Or is this merely a case of someone buying this stuff under a shell company and then passing it along?

I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.